![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Gambling is central to our understanding of political economy, but the dominant story told about gambling within our subfield is highly partial. It focuses on globally spectacular forms and places of gambling, especially casinos. It tends to associate gambling with neo-liberal formulations of political economy. And it tends to fixate on men’s play. In this article, I seek to show the value of an alternative lens on gambling and political economy, provided by the game of bingo. I hereby aim to improve our academic accounts of gambling, such that they take better account of everyday games, and of capitalism, such that they are better attuned to its heterogeneity and its regulatory interactions with other, more-than-capitalist economies. Relying on historical law and policy debates about bingo in the UK, I make two arguments. Firstly, I tell a new story about gambling and political economy, by excavating a crucial mutual aid dimension to gambling liberalisation debates in the 1950s and 60s, and showing how that dimension fared under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government (1979–90). Secondly, I use bingo as an entry point to a different way of conceptualising political economy, where the state regulation of diverse economies is a central preoccupation.
KEYWORDS:
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 In 2019, PR spokesman for betting company Coral told Racing TV that Cheltenham ‘is the biggest week of the betting year, I think a figure of £500m will be bet across the industry. There is no other meeting like it.’ See https://www.racingtv.com/news/bookmakers-set-for-multimillion-pound-cheltenham-betting-bonanza
3 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-wales-52605459/coronavirus-dancing-in-the-street-and-lockdown-bingo
6 See discussion in Bedford Citation2019.
7 For more on such discourses, see Bedford (Citation2019); Baker and Simon (Citation2002); de Goede (Citation2005); Reith (Citation2007).
8 A partial exception is an essay on social reproduction which highlights the need for practices oriented to cooperation, collective well-being, and mutual support to be better resourced, ‘and perhaps even regulate(d) in a friendly way’ (Pavlovskaya Citation2015: 291).
9 In a similar vein, anarchist authors often posit the household and community as sites of mutual aid, counterposed to capitalist regulation; see discussion in Bedford (Citation2019).
10 See Pearse v. Hart [1955] and Maynard v. Williams [1955] 1 WLR 54 and extended discussion in Bedford (Citation2019).
11 Downs (Citation2009); Miers (Citation2004).
12 See e.g. Tynewydd Labour Working Men’s Club and Institute Ltd v. The Commissioners [1980] VATTR 165.
13 For thresholds, and penalties, see Bingo Duty (Exemptions) Order 1982 and discussion in Bedford (Citation2019).
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Kate Bedford
Kate Bedford is an interdisciplinary scholar interested in political economy, development, socio-legal studies, and gender/sexuality studies. Her first book (Developing Partnerships: Gender, Sexuality and the Reformed World Bank, 2009) explored the World Bank's gender and development lending in Latin America. Her second book (Bingo Capitalism: The Law and Political Economy of Everyday Gambling) provided a gendered political economy of gambling law and regulation. She is involved in a new project exploring the consequences of the turn to law within gender and development.